Making games = hard work.

[CrazyBernie]

A testament to those with both the skill and the creativity to create games.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/02/supe ... deo-games/

Ever since I can remember playing games (video games, book games, pencil & paper RPGs, etc), I've always had the desire to create... something. Unfortunately, my innate (human?) desire (genetic disposition?) to consume always manages to overrule my desire to learn the skills necessary to bring into reality the crazy jumble of ideas spinning around in my head. Well, there's also the matter of my approximately three second attention span. 0_o This of course creates somewhat of a crazy downward (or maybe upward) spiral... the more I consume, the more ideas claw their way into existence, the more distracted I become, the more I consume... I await the impending explosion, and only hope it leads to a massive, practical output of creative energy. I figure worse case scenario, I become the embodiment of my own namesake - a crazed lunatic.

.... So what I was trying to say: My hats off to those who can combine the tools necessary to make that which I so greedily consume, and on the same note, *shakes fist in the air* damn you! Cut that out!


Oh look, something shiny! *runs off*

[Randomizer]

Did you ever get to the guy working on time fuse powder kegs? Back during beta testing the rain could put out his fuses.

[CrazyBernie]

Well... umm... it's in my Steam library... but see... it's like this...

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And that doesn't count Indie Gala, Humble Bundle, games I haven't activated from various bundles, my Xbox One, Wii U, etc... the sad part is most of them go unplayed... between work, wife, and a three year old I just don't get to game all that much. Not a huge excuse really, since a lot of them would still not get played; I'm addicted to hoarding games, it would seem. I did think for a time about kicking off a gameplay review fest... I could easily kick off hundreds of hours of youtube gameplay videos. I also have a little Intel Atom powered tablet with Windows 8.1 that I thought would be a good low performance machine to test out my library on... maybe show off it's capabilities. It's crazy how well some of the games look and run from the Windows App Store vs traditional desktop games.

I am pushing myself back into TB games, but I've been on a Sci-Fi kick lately. I'm trying to finish Fallout: New Vegas before #4 comes out, and I've also put in a lot of time in Xenonauts (delicious... an X-COM clone that actually does it right) the past week or so. I also put in a couple hundred hours between Minecraft, Terraria, and Starbound right before switching to F:NV (haha, and I don't get to game like I used to... that's insane when you really think about it, but most of my play time lately has been on the road, in hotel room, on a Surface 3 Pro Tablet with Intel Graphics, which limited my options). I have a Minecraft server at my house that I was using to play with several family members, and I was thinking of virtualizing it and adding a Terraria server alongside (i really need to build a new system with dual NICs, but $$$...). Those damn updates always screw things up, and everyone stops playing while waiting for the latest patch.

So if I finish up New Vegas before F4, and my wife doesn't suck up all my time with Mortal Kombat X, Diablo 3 or Overlord: Fellowship of Evil (she prefers action-y games, and says I've been soloing it too much lately), I'll fire up Book 3 and see if I can add another game to my small pile of "finished" games.

Did I also mention I'd like to create things? *sigh*

[Leezar]

If you have an old Macintosh, try hypercard.

Crazy easy to program and you can actually make a decent dungeon crawler with minimal effort - I made a couple myself.

It is a bit wonky though, like stats jumping around or resetting at zero for no apparent reason what-so-ever, so its difficult to get something truly serious going, but it doesnt sound like thats what you are after anyways...

Trust me, with just half a week free-time or so you can create half an hour entertainment for some (un)lucky guinea pig.

[blatherbeard]

I feel your pain Cb.

I have 7 to 8 chapters of a book i started about 5 years or so ago.

I also have hundreds of unfinished games.

a brewing kit that ive not used yet, a few years gone by for that as well.

i always get caught up in life and/or replaying games like Skyrim, Eschalon, Fallouts(all of them) and a few others letting other games slide completely or quarter to half played.

oh and i promised myself id learn to use the unreal 4 engine and that is downloaded at least....

[CrazyBernie]

@ Leezar

Ew, Macintosh.

Unfortunately it takes more than free time... it also takes a lack of distractions. It's pretty hard to learn anything that's retain-able when you've got a high energy three-year old running circles around everything.


@ blatherbeard

I purchased an entire (and constantly updated) course on learning C# by programming games in Unity 5... never got past the intro video.

Bought the Drizzt Collector's Edition Volume One with the intent of blasting through the series and picking up the rest of the books as I read... haven't gotten more than a fifth through that first volume...

The closest I got to being really productive was when I started a video course for the Cisco CCNA certification... of course I was unemployed for a couple of months and with my son in daycare I had both quiet time as well as motivation. Then I started working again and Cisco stuff was entirely unnecessary and sort of fell by the wayside.

I've also been working on a design for a desk... as a gamer and computer enthusiast I've been looking for "The Ultimate Gaming Desk," and so far I've been very disappointed with what's available on the market. So my only real solution is to "roll my own." I'm working on a modular design with mounting points and bolt on pieces, made out of steel or aluminum, with the entire surface being some sort of gaming grade optical mouse friendly material, built in power, video, audio, wireless charging, etc... unfortunately I'm too lazy/distracted to learn some proper 3D design software so I can create an actual mockup. Of course, the magnitude of it all is a little intimidating... designing the components, the electrical, the modularity considerations... sometimes I get overwhelmed just thinking about it for more than a few minutes. I'd like it to be a marketable design... and I even thought about crowd-funding, but that has it's own risks, of course.

Maybe once I get a house and a proper office/den, I'll be able to hole myself up and go mad scientist crazy and finally create something (IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIIIIIIIVE!! Mauahahahah!).

[vdweller]

Making games is hard? Are you serious??

You imply that I, vdweller, who has started making a game back in 2012 and is still crawling towards the finishing line, had a hard time?

You, sir, must be insane!

No, you don't have to code your guts off. And you defintely don't have to run the GODDAMN game for the 11th time, to recreate the exact same circumstances that led "that one time before" to a crash. And why the hell does this variable keep being reset to zero!!?!?!??

And you most definitely don't have to create buttons, menus, AND ALL THE GOD DAMN LITTLE GRAPHICS. Some are animated, too! Hooray! Let's render this 3D animation to a 2D sprite for the 457th time, because last time we forgot to add ground shadows!

Game design? The hell is that? Oh, it's this thing that if you forget it, you will find out that a game feature totally conflicts with another feature, so maybe I have to spend some time to plan how things work, too.

Now if you don't have a budget to pay artists, how about learning digital painting yourself? Boy was this fun! It was like learning to nurse fucking elephant babies.

Oh and don't even get me started on balancing shit out, ironing details, and creating the F*#^%@! tutorial.

But man, once you make it, and it works, ain't it a beauty.

All those soulless lines of gibberish, getting turned into something else...something that people can actually have fun with. And that, my friend, is the moment where you look back, back in 2012 or whenever you started working just with a couple lines of code and a handful of placeholder graphics, sweat on your brows, your woman yelling at ya for not hanging the laundry out to dry,

and you finally look at what you have achieved all this time.

And noone else cares.

Because you're nobody.

You're not some famous "indie" person. Man, don't even let me get started on this "indie" crap. How can anything that forms such a tight cluster of internal relationships, prior fame (Derek Yu was *some* person around *some net circles* before Spelunky) and money (a budget of $100,000 isn't Ubisoft-class budget but is 10x what I make a year) be called "indie"? Indie compared to what? EA? Can I become Indie too? But how can I? I don't have a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever account. And if I *do* have to have one to make myself trendy, and waste precious time updating my status showing off my new kewl in-game menu instead of developing the actual game, because I have to attract the interest of some random people, how is this not dependent? Is it independent?

When Daisuke Amaya made Cave Story, now that was indie. I don't think anyone knew about this guy. And then BAM.

So yes. Nowadays it's hard to be a game developer. But what saddens me is this exact statement. It's not hard to make a game. It's hard to be a game deveoper, with all the shit you have to deal with to make yourself known.